It is vital that you not run software which modifies the Planetside 2 client in any way. If you do this, you are indistinguishable from various hacks that work in the same manner. The result of this is that you will be banned from gameplay and lose your characters/items.

We cannot make exceptions to this. We do understand there are relatively harmless apps that fall in this category, but if we allowed those they would simply be used as a shield excuse by players trying to cheat. This same rule applies to data that Planetside 2 uses for gameplay. Do not modify any of these files or attempt to modify them in memory.

There are some applications that modify the windows or directx environment without changing the client. These may also result in suspensions unless we specifically exempt them and declare them ok to use.

The most simple guidance here is do not use third party programs which change the Planetside 2 gameplay in any way unless it has been specifically cleared by SOE.

The above does not apply to user initiated *.INI changes, those are allowed, although setting your own options incorrectly can result in bugs.

Prez wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 19:58:Help me out here - I think I understand the basics of 'ping' but I may be oversimplifying it. A ping of 250 is actually 250 milliseconds, or one full quarter of a second. In other words, as I understand it, with that ping you would have to conceivably be aiming where your opponent will be in a quarter second from when you fire. Is that correct? A bit of a noob question I know but being a singleplayer gamer my whole life I have never really paid much attention to multiplayer idioms. Never really paid much attention to networking at all until only recently.

Sort of. I'm really rusty on this stuff but...

The ping is usually round-trip time, so it's how long it takes your cpu to send a packet, the packet to get there, the server to process it, packet to get back and your cpu to process it.

However that does not mean your latency is actually half the ping.

Remember what you see on screen is already out of date by the time it took you to get the data from the server. So by the time the server gets your response the total gap is indeed the full ping time.

This is based on Quake-style netcode where everything is done on the server. I'm not going to try and explain or even pretend to understand other approaches because whenever I read anything about them I get annoyed - IMHO the server should be king and arbiter, any other way is stupid and unfair.

It also assumes there is no timenudge/prediction/hocus-pocus going on. Some games try to reduce the effect of latency by putting info on screen that is a guess about the future. When it is accurate it does effectively negate the latency and you aim where you want to hit. But when it is wrong it can double or treble your effective latency because it showed you the player being distance-moved-in-100msec to the left of where he actually was when packet was sent out to you, but by the time you get it he might actually have gone distance-moved-in-100msec to the right thus the error is 200msec. However, by the time that is worked out it is again making another prediction a futher distance-moved-in-100msec to the right so the total on-screen adjustment is 300msec.

Again I favour Quake approach here because the default timenudge was 0 but player could set it to their preference. It's more common for games to force some prediction and not even tell you that it is doing it.

The average casual gamer wants to shoot where he wants to hit, therefore wants prediction. The average "skilled" player wants to control leading the target etc so wants minimum error, i.e no prediction (well okay, maybe a small amount of timenudge if has highish ping; a small amount of timenudge should be quite accurate, I would think the errors should scale up dramatically with the level of tn applied, probably logarithmically or exponentially)

This all gets a lot more complicated once you factor in the server calculating the gamestate in intervals, it taking time to do so, the latency in your cpu/graphics card/mouse etc

Prez wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 19:58:Help me out here - I think I understand the basics of 'ping' but I may be oversimplifying it. A ping of 250 is actually 250 milliseconds, or one full quarter of a second. In other words, as I understand it, with that ping you would have to conceivably be aiming where your opponent will be in a quarter second from when you fire. Is that correct? A bit of a noob question I know but being a singleplayer gamer my whole life I have never really paid much attention to multiplayer idioms. Never really paid much attention to networking at all until only recently.

Never played Quake online back in the day? Remember how there were LPB and HPB servers? It was because at that time T1 lines were the big thing for hosting servers at colleges. So guys with 0-5 pings were on servers crushing people with normal 56k connections who had ~200 pings. Thus became HPB (High Ping Bastard) servers for the 56k modem players and LPB (Low Ping Bastard) servers for the people playing on college networks etc. LPB servers even had it set so if you went over like a 100 ping it would auto kick you in some cases even. The difference and advantage between a 50> ping like I normally get with my fiber optics and the 250 ping he is getting from Australia is astronomical especially since the shooting is twitch based. The gameplay in Planetside 1 very well may have been passible for him even with a 250 ping as the shooting was less twitch based and more just... 1 huge hitbox with a healthbar, than PS2 which has headshots and a faster TTK.

ahh the nostalgia - i was more of a quake 2 guy myself, but i ruled the HP rocket arena servers. i got so good at leading people with my 300 ping i'd either get accused of hacking, or invited to a clan on the spot. as a rule in that game, 100 ping = 1 step of lead. i just pictured people 3 steps ahead of where they were and BAM! rail kill.

I'm a little surprised at this. It was only a few days ago that the official planetside2 twitter account was linking to beautiful Planetside 2 wallpapers made with SweetFX, and Matt Higby have previously commented that he used SweetFX as well, so I had the feeling that they liked my mod at SOE. The community certainly did.

The current policy of banning people when in doubt seems harsh to me, when a server kick with a warning would have accomplished the same.It's not like permabanning people is going to stop cheaters for long - it's a free-to-play so they'll just make new accounts.

Prez wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 19:58:Help me out here - I think I understand the basics of 'ping' but I may be oversimplifying it. A ping of 250 is actually 250 milliseconds, or one full quarter of a second. In other words, as I understand it, with that ping you would have to conceivably be aiming where your opponent will be in a quarter second from when you fire. Is that correct? A bit of a noob question I know but being a singleplayer gamer my whole life I have never really paid much attention to multiplayer idioms. Never really paid much attention to networking at all until only recently.

Never played Quake online back in the day? Remember how there were LPB and HPB servers? It was because at that time T1 lines were the big thing for hosting servers at colleges. So guys with 0-5 pings were on servers crushing people with normal 56k connections who had ~200 pings. Thus became HPB (High Ping Bastard) servers for the 56k modem players and LPB (Low Ping Bastard) servers for the people playing on college networks etc. LPB servers even had it set so if you went over like a 100 ping it would auto kick you in some cases even. The difference and advantage between a 50> ping like I normally get with my fiber optics and the 250 ping he is getting from Australia is astronomical especially since the shooting is twitch based. The gameplay in Planetside 1 very well may have been passible for him even with a 250 ping as the shooting was less twitch based and more just... 1 huge hitbox with a healthbar, than PS2 which has headshots and a faster TTK.

Prez wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 19:58:Help me out here - I think I understand the basics of 'ping' but I may be oversimplifying it. A ping of 250 is actually 250 milliseconds, or one full quarter of a second. In other words, as I understand it, with that ping you would have to conceivably be aiming where your opponent will be in a quarter second from when you fire. Is that correct? A bit of a noob question I know but being a singleplayer gamer my whole life I have never really paid much attention to multiplayer idioms. Never really paid much attention to networking at all until only recently.

In laymans terms yes, there's a lot more to it but that's about the gist. It depends on the game and its net code too. A lot of games have compensation in the netcode to equalize things for console players who typically have shared connections and don't know how to shape their own traffic at home. Some FPS games like Quake and Counterstrike let the server and client tweak to an insane degree. Generally you'll enjoy the experience more with a lower ping. I have no clue why anyone would think they deserve a playable experience in an MMOFPS with anything above 150ms.

Help me out here - I think I understand the basics of 'ping' but I may be oversimplifying it. A ping of 250 is actually 250 milliseconds, or one full quarter of a second. In other words, as I understand it, with that ping you would have to conceivably be aiming where your opponent will be in a quarter second from when you fire. Is that correct? A bit of a noob question I know but being a singleplayer gamer my whole life I have never really paid much attention to multiplayer idioms. Never really paid much attention to networking at all until only recently.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Don't know what server you play on but on Waterson we (TR) had all 3 continents locked for over 24 hours about a day ago. The only competition on the server is Xen of Onslaught and DVS. Everyone else is pretty much scrubfactor.

Next time you hear that whoosh sound go past your head don't think of it as a bullet, think of it as my joke

nin: This forum is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.Blue: What do you mean, "biblical"?xXBatmanXx: What he means is Old BBS, El Presidente, real wrath of SysOp type stuff.

DG wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 17:56:While we're here, htf do you use the jetpack? Isn't it the F key? It's worked once and never again. I can see the power bar thing in the bottom-right corner so pretty sure I do have it equipped, but nothing happens.

Yeah 250 isn't viable IMHO. 165 was awful for me on the EU servers, I couldn't play on that. 100 on East US is fine, though a bit of a crapshoot at range. In particular I can't hit anything that flies, though unsure how much of that is me being crap.

While we're here, htf do you use the jetpack? Isn't it the F key? It's worked once and never again. I can see the power bar thing in the bottom-right corner so pretty sure I do have it equipped, but nothing happens.

Asmo wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 16:48:Sorry, your "protip" is junk, I've unloaded in to people point blank with a scattermax and they've taken zero damage (ie. no red X to indicate you are doing damage), then they lag dance around me until I'm dead.

On other days, I can literally drop people in 3-4 shots in the center of mass (so not headshots).

This is despite running a fairly constant ping of 250 (run on a US server with friends from Aus).

Compare this to PS1 which I used to play on dialup from Aus to the US and use voice comms over, where lag was rarely an issue...

I've also been killed 5 seconds after running behind hard cover or had my heavy shield stop no damage (seems to activate after the shooters client declares me dead but before the server tells my client to lie down and take a dirt nap).

The netcode/client prediction isn't great, certainly not as clean as PS1. You'll notice a lot people jump around like spaz's when you start shooting them. Most of the time you'll barely register a hit before you get dead.

haven't noticed any of this sorry, but I also play on an 85mbps connection on an East Coast server while living on the East Coast. As well as having my install sitting on an SSD (Not sure if that helps). But as Mgshadow said, your 250 ping is definitely not helping.

As far as your experience with PS1, there were also 250-300 person continent locks. Which alleviated a lot of the lag you're probably having on a server holding thousands on a single Continent.

The only guy I've seen lag as bad as you're describing is an outfitmate who plays from Afghanistan, we send him in whenever we need him to use his "Lag fu".

Prez wrote on Nov 28, 2012, 16:23:I was nodding through this entire post. I haven't tried PS2 yet, but this EXACT thing happens to me so often in other multiplayer games that there is ZERO fun in them (and it's exactly why I am not installing PS2). It is the height of frustration to get the drop on someone but because they can hop around like a ballet-trained faerie rabbit on crack you die every time. Screw that crap.

Fortunately my experience is that bunny hopping and hyperactive strafing isn't much of a problem. Players run at a reasonable speed, sprinting lowers your weapon, and strafing is slower than running forwards. Plus there's huge accuracy penalties for moving and firing from the hip. It's balanced a lot like the Battlefield games, and not at all like Quake.

Sorry, your "protip" is junk, I've unloaded in to people point blank with a scattermax and they've taken zero damage (ie. no red X to indicate you are doing damage), then they lag dance around me until I'm dead.

On other days, I can literally drop people in 3-4 shots in the center of mass (so not headshots).

This is despite running a fairly constant ping of 250 (run on a US server with friends from Aus).

Compare this to PS1 which I used to play on dialup from Aus to the US and use voice comms over, where lag was rarely an issue...

I've also been killed 5 seconds after running behind hard cover or had my heavy shield stop no damage (seems to activate after the shooters client declares me dead but before the server tells my client to lie down and take a dirt nap).

The netcode/client prediction isn't great, certainly not as clean as PS1. You'll notice a lot people jump around like spaz's when you start shooting them. Most of the time you'll barely register a hit before you get dead.

Right now the biggest technical problem with this game is lag and fps. When there are lot of players on screen, it's like all your shots don't register against your enemies, you have to empty whole clips into people to kill them. While in smaller battles, each shot seems to register and hit.

Just ran into this a min ago. Thought I'd pop in for a quick game, deployed to a based under attack, went to capture a flag. Got it, then went to a corner, crouched, and waited. (I knew someone would come running in to check on it) A few moments later someone comes in, runs right in front of me, I'm aiming down the sites, hvy with reflex scope, top tier gun, plus 2nd grip, open up on this guy into his back, he spins and starts straffing back and forth, I pop on my energy shield ability and he kills me.

There would be no chance if lag wasn't so screwed up in the game. You're better off moving while you fire which is stupid. You shouldn't be accurate when you're standing and moving around but with the way lag works the enemy player needs to lead you by a small amount in the direction you're moving so that means shooting at the air and when you straff back and forth it almost makes more sense to just spray back and forth.

Shotguns are hilarious up close. It should end someone with ease but since you only get one shot to hit someone if you do't predict where they'l be in half a second you're just blasting away at them and you should be hitting but you aren't.

Ugh, so frustrating. It's not very common, in most cases you're at a decent range but when it does happen it sucks.

Pro Tip: Try aiming for the head, Planetside 2 actually has headshots. There is no reason you should ever be killed for putting bullets into someones "Back". Put them in the back of the head.

Don't know what server you play on but on Waterson we (TR) had all 3 continents locked for over 24 hours about a day ago. The only competition on the server is Xen of Onslaught and DVS. Everyone else is pretty much scrubfactor.